We review some recent results on variants of global Carleman weights and Carleman inequalities applied to singular controllability and inverse problems partially developed in collaboration with the authors in a series of papers. First of all, we explain how we can modify weights to study one measurement inverse problems for the heat and wave equations with discontinuous coefficients in the principal part, in a case of locally supported boundary observations for recovering coefficients in the wave equation and we mention also some recent results for the Sch¨odinger equation. As another important application, we show how time-variable global Carleman weights are applied to study the null- controllability for a Navier-Stokes-rigid solid problem in moving domains.